They need to find a way to detect XIV Alexander and ban people

[Shougun]

All that stuff should be in the game by default. A shame that players have to create plugins for that.

Some of those maybe not, like the triple triad that basically holds your hand- that'd be weird for SE to self design... but also if it was a part of some sort of addon that was allowed (like WoW's) I'd not mind either.

Though just to make sure we're on the same page that idea that these exist doesn't bother me, the idea that they do nothing, are not helpful, are not substantial, that people are playing them down WAY WAY TOO MUCH, is what kind of gets me. Many of these provide a level of information that you'd never have, even if you tried, because they're just not that kind of player (few might be, but I'd wager most are not). They're not a running computer able to handle all that information so quickly and delicately. It easily provides features that you can't just "think about on your own".

These addons ABSOLUTELY under, imo, no possible argument, provide substantial boosts to QoL, information, and in some ways actual gameplay too (though like Alexander their feature boost to gameplay only helps make things more fair, which is honestly a good thing). They are powerful, there is thousands of volunteer hours spent on them- they're not nothing. Maybe not evil cheaty hax, but they're NOT nothing.

I don't appreciate people pretending that it's all something you can do in your head or whatever. Seems dishonest or perhaps ignorance on the amount of power some of those tools can offer, imo.

[Kuroka]

Gives an unfair advantage to PC players. Meanwhile, console players don't get to use such things.

Its not even about that, cheating and modding, makin things easier as theyre supposed to be gets us to a point where you either use it or be left behind....

[Shialan]

So, you are against everything that makes it easier for players to do stuff. Are you then also against all these fan sites that are out there? Who help you create crafting rotations or show you the most efficient route of gathering materials? Who have timer for gathering nodes or FATE spawns? Which use math and probability to "solve" cactpot?


Because if you are not against them, you are a hypocrite.

[van_arn]

I really don't like the idea that players not using a third-party app that requires login credentials puts them at a disadvantage against players that do share their credentials.

An individual mod might be a trivial delta on its own, but a whole mess of them piled on top of each other are more than a trivial difference.

[Moonlite]

A couple of things stuck me reading the comments. The illegal thing is not valid quit spouting it. Several other global games have it and have not been in any legal trouble.



Next for people that don't know. It doesn't matter if players cheat or pay for advantages. FF14 has no winning so it is OK. Several of the ardent defenders of all things SE have informed me this is so.


The info for the addon was very interesting and thank you, Shougun. The boss mechanics thing is kind of iffy, and I thought it was iffy in other games. We already generally get a tell. SE doesn't need to add more tells just make it easier it is the same thing. The animation lock thing would be so nice in PvP. MCH has an attack and I am always like hurry up finish animation so can get next skill off. It is very long and feels like five mississippi (probably isn't just feels that way).

[Shurrikhan]

So, you are against everything that makes it easier for players to do stuff. Are you then also against all these fan sites that are out there? Who help you create crafting rotations or show you the most efficient route of gathering materials? Who have timer for gathering nodes or FATE spawns? Which use math and probability to "solve" cactpot?

Because if you are not against them, you are a hypocrite.

Used YouTube to learn about your job? Third-party tool. Banned.
Visited the Balance? Third-party tool. Banned.
Used Garland Tools to more handily figure out where to get the materials for what you intend to craft? Third-party tool. Banned.
Used a calculator at some point? Third-party tool. Banned.
Recorded your gameplay for future reference or sharing? Third-party tool. Banned.
Streamed on Twitch? Third-party tool. Banned.
Mathed out your chances for optimizing your Cactpot on a piece of paper? Not SE's. Banned.

I'm not sure why people think that having an overlay is somehow fundamentally different than, say, a picture-in-picture mini-window of the website they're borrowing crafting rotations from. And, as you said, if the latter is permitted...

Its not even about that, cheating and modding, makin things easier as theyre supposed to be gets us to a point where you either use it or be left behind....

There's a difference between a plugin that shouts at you which mechanic is coming next and one that simply makes your UI something you can stand or that allows for better PF filtering, prevents getting booted over certain types of lobby errors, corrects netcode as not to doubly punish players for their ping in attempting to double-weave, etc.

The prior is a cheat and yes, should be prevented; the latter is the community picking up the slack for the dev team.

[AtlasS]

Lmao what a stupid post.

[Packetdancer]

What the title says. I just found out that it literally tells you things in the game that you shouldn't know prior. For example. WHen you do the Gold Saucer Mini Cactpot, it will LIGHT UP the ones you want to click for the highest reward... That's absurd.

So, mildly tangential here, but... so far as I know, the Mini-Cactpot answers are never transmitted to the client until you've scratched the space to reveal it.

However, once you know certain numbers, you can (kind of) use Math (yay!) to come up with a likely winner; i.e., if you know that this number is here, and this number is here, then the highest possible reward in this line will be X, etc. Then you can solve for each line and determine what the one most likely to have the biggest payout is. It's not a guarantee -- you could get a line that gives you 36 MGP and miss one that could give you a couple of thousand -- but knowing that line might have the biggest payout on the board is still a decent thing to take a shot at.

I mean, if you've played a lot of mini cactpot, you can probably do the math in your head, but there are "mini-cactpot solver" programs out there which handle the "Now is MATH!" part for you, where it just asks you "what's your first square", you fill it in, and it says "okay, click one of these squares so we know what the number there is, then fill that in", etc., and it does the aforementioned math for you.

(I wrote a cactpot solver as a proof of concept a while back to demonstrate a Python concept to a friend, but there's plenty hosted on webpages and stuff; there's this one, among others.)

I suspect if there's a Cactpot Solver add-on for the game, it probably just does the same thing, since -- as noted -- so far as I know the Mini-Cactpot doesn't send the answers to the client until you click on the square. I know this because I had a massive lag spike while playing mini-cactpot last week, and I'd click on a square and it would take like 10 seconds for the answer to come back so it could reveal the number. :|

I mean, it's still kind of "meh" to build the solver right into the game client via a mod, no lie, but it also seems to me like not something worth making a huge fuss over; you could do the same thing on a pad of paper with a pencil, or by using one of those websites.

[Packetdancer]

I've been a little bit more on the oddball side here since LONG ago being pro-addons and SE actively trying to make the UI as gracious as possible (as for addons I think being strict on parse shaming is important, but I've never been against people learning from their parse). Maybe on SE aggressively improving their UI isn't so odd, and I do have a number of UI threads (which I feel a number of people were listened to explicitly in this last expansion, since there were like 5 or more unique posts some of them mine that I was like "eehhhYY thank you!" lol).

I mean, I am in general in favor of add-ons myself... which is not going to come as a shock to anyone who knew me back in the WildStar community.

I was the lunatic that noticed Bitwise over at Carbine had included a mod development kit in the very first closed beta build, then noticed that the friends list was broken in the first build we got in closed beta, and promptly posted a replacement friends list as a mod to the closed beta forums 4 hours later. I then spent like a year and change working with Bitwise and the others at Carbine -- along with various other early mod authors -- to make sure the add-on API was audited heavily before release.

See, I firmly believe that add-ons can be hugely beneficial: one person made an accessibility add-on for those with impaired vision, turning the game's UI extremely high-contrast (to make it more legible) and adding little sound cues to let you know "oh, that's a vendor you're standing next to" and so on. We also made add-ons that helped RPers, by providing extensions to the base chatbox log (allowing you to create tabs for a specific 'scene' and save them out, among other things). Add-ons that let you keep notes as you wandered around the world, so if you discovered a little bit of lore tucked away in a corner, you could open the window for my "Journalism" mod and drop a pin and type up a little note associated with that pin.

All sorts of quality-of-life stuff.

But we also made a lot of add-ons that were borderline cheat-y, or even outright malicious. At Bitwise's request, mind you! He said "make add-ons to do the most evil stuff you can think of, so that we can find the issues and make the API hard to abuse before release." (The 'evil' add-ons were, obviously, never published to the rest of the closed beta players, just within the add-on crew who were supposed to be trying to break stuff.)

For instance, mods couldn't control your character, thus preventing botting. Sensible! But I demonstrated a proof-of-concept where I made an IPC channel (inter-process communication) using, of all things, the Windows clipboard, and an external program that would read commands from the clipboard and could then drive your character by 'pushing keys'; the add-on in game could read game state and decide what your character should do, write the 'this is what I need you to do' to the clipboard, and the external program would generate keystrokes and mouse movements to drive your character as requested.

This demonstrated there was a hole in the add-on design; no one had thought anything would be wrong with letting add-ons write to the system clipboard. Hey, could be nice, right? Click on a thing and get the map location to paste into chat, or Discord, or whatnot. But the clipboard functionality had to be removed, because demonstrably you could abuse it to drive external programs (which could, in turn, generate keystrokes to drive the game itself).

We spent like a year deliberately poking holes in stuff, and then helping devise fixes.

And that's the thing. If you just graft add-ons onto the side of the program, you run the risk that they can do all sorts of not-great stuff. You really want add-ons designed into the game from day one, or else it's gonna be painful.

So while I'm in favor of add-ons in the abstract, I do not necessarily think it'd be a great idea for Square-Enix to stuff them officially into FFXIV, because I think when the add-ons aren't part of the system design from day one, you run the risk of some serious bad actors abusing your system. And if it's via an official avenue, not unauthorized modifications, then cracking down on that stuff becomes a great deal more difficult.

So, do I wish FFXIV had proper support for add-ons? Often. Do I think they should add them at this point in the game's life-cycle? Absolutely not.

[Rhysati]

The prior is a cheat and yes, should be prevented

Is it though? One could simply read or watch a guide and they would know what move is coming next. In fact, this is what just about everyone does when tackling harder content. Very few times will a run be completely blind for everyone in the party. And when it comes to raids and the like, it is almost mandatory for everyone in that content to know ahead of time what to expect.

So it isn't a cheat to know what's coming. That only leaves the idea that a tool that tells you what comes next is a cheat. And then I ask: What if you wrote down the order at which abilities are used in the fight and had that next to your monitor or on a second monitor? What if you are watching a video of the fight that's 5-10 seconds ahead of where you are in the fight so that you know what's coming? Are those cheats?

At this point I would hope we would agree that none of the things states so far are a 'cheat'. So what about a tool that tells you in-game is a cheat? Plenty of other MMOs allow such tools because it's just another way of using the information that is already available. It's just a different way of reading the info, watching the info, or listening to the info. It's just in-game to make it more convenient.

So I'm very curious: What is it that makes this a cheat that should be prevented?